Rapidshare starts selling prepaid cards

Next time you going to buy some magazines, you might be able to pick up unlimited downloads from Rapidshare.com as well: The well-known one-click file hoster is beginning to sell prepaid cards through retail outlets in Europe, according to a report from Onlinekosten.de. Users will be able to buy cards with varying denominations, starting with a one month membership and going all the way up to a whole year of access.

Rapidshare has been offering premium accounts for years now. Paying users are not only able to download files at higher speed rates and without waiting, but also upload files as big as 2GB. Critics have long suspected that Rapidshare is essentially making money off of users downloading movies and other copyrighted works, but the company has argued that it's merely hosting and not indexing any files and also offered rights holders various ways to take down infringing content.

Either way, the introduction of prepaid cards could be a big boon to Rapidshare's bottom line: Many European countries make it hard, if not impossible for minors to get credit cards, but teenagers are exactly the audience Rapidshare has been targeting with its Rapidgames section and its upcoming Rapidmusic service.